Time for a quick tangential pre-election post. Personally I can completely understand the apathy felt by those that will not be voting on Thursday. However I do hope there is a large and diverse pool of voters regardless. The biggest issue I feel that faces us during the next 5 years of British government is the structure of society itself and the divide between and lack of mobility within it. While I feel this is something that has been raised more during the campaigns this year than at previous elections with numerous smaller parties gaining popularity, I’m still not convinced any of the parties have policies in their manifestos to back up real change on the issue.

Gaining employment and ‘progressing’ within a career is becoming very antithetical to traditional values of hard work and a willingness to learn. It seems more than ever people face a very tough, almost game-like, process to gain access to a ‘professional’ job market where there are few opportunities to progress without further compounding the ‘game’ itself. The barrier to entry and progression in the professional world doesn’t help the tiered society we see, and creates conflict for people who don’t want to compromise on their own values to earn a decent wage.

To me small businesses seem to provide the greatest opportunity for people to grow and learn in this society due to their independence, but it is entirely up to how they are run as to whether they provide such opportunities. Independence of small business is not a reliable recipe for social mobility.

Personally I wonder if a shift in values (towards a greater, more equal quality of life for all) and greater respect for them in society is the only thing that can change this situation, rather than politics itself. While I will be voting, I don’t think this issue will be righted by any one political party.

In contrast to my previous post I wanted to lighten things up with a bit of positivity and it just so happens that this is about a Java application server (of the sort I was moaning about earlier) that in its latest incarnation is actually really nice to work with.

Some boring history

The landscape of application servers changes at a fast pace, meaning that the decision as to which platform meets an organisation’s needs can change from one year to the next. Not a problem if the standards were followed such that you can simply take all your applications and deploy them in another environment without making any changes. While that is the promise of standards based application servers such as Java EE products, as highlighted in numerous posts I’ve made, this is not the reality.

The above means that from my own personal perspective my ‘favourite’ application server to work with has changed over time. Back when Java was owned by Sun Microsystems, I was very impressed with the open source, freely available reference implementation of Java EE that was Glassfish. This was a solid offering that was so close to the spec most likely because Sun were behind Glassfish and they also ultimately presided over Java, the JCP. They were almost, but not quite, the benevolent dictator – which was fine by me. Glassfish had a great admin user interface – actually way better in terms of UX than all the commercial offerings of the time in my opinion.

Since then of course Oracle have taken over as a less than benevolent dictator, and of course they are more likely to push their own commercial products. I don’t have a huge problem with this in principle and some good things have happened in the Java world under their watch. However it inevitably means that other products have moved on at a faster pace than Glassfish. Java and the JCP programme behind Java EE specs are still ‘open source’, but since Oracle actually sell application servers (and lots of other enterprise products) I find it hard to believe there is not a conflict of interest and that the direction of this is not somewhat controlled by them.

What’s your point?

Well one of the Java EE offerings around for some time is JBoss. The company behind JBoss is Redhat, a well known for-profit provider of open source software. I previously found JBoss it to be lacking in a decent admin UI and somewhat clunky to configure through a confusing mire of XML files. There were also many issues with class loading conflicts that it seems so many of these environments struggle with. Having said this it was certainly not a bad option if you were going down the Java EE route.

Enter WildFly – which is the latest version of JBoss. It has been reimagined and is a lighter weight, easy to work with solution. It has a nice modular system for class loading and the XML configuration has been paired down to a straightforward set of very human readable files. It is also based on years of rigorous work pushing the boundaries of many aspects of Java software development providing options for many things such as dependency injection. But the nice thing is you don’t have to use any of the Redhat stack (such as Weld DI), if you don’t want to. It doesn’t seem to make it nearly impossible to work with other third party libraries for which they have their own implementation. The same can’t be said for other commercial application servers. It also has a nice, dare I say it, visually pleasing admin UI.

The disclaimer

I should add I’m in no way affiliated with JBoss / WildFly, nor would recommend you choose to use it purely on the basis of this blog post either! But do consider checking it out at http://wildfly.org/ if you are interested in new developments in application server technologies.

There is an old saying that ‘a leopard never changes his spots’ which, with regards to large companies which are dominant players in a market, can be an unfortunate truth.

I’ve just spent a large part of my day trying to configure an application to run in an environment one of the big boys make a lot of money out of. Much as I find it awkward to talk up my abilities as a software engineer, it is probably necessary to mention I have worked with many such environments in the past and I’ve learnt from some of the brightest academics and senior engineers you could hope to meet in this country. Whether that qualifies me as no idiot when it comes to this stuff, I’ll let you decide. But having spent some time attempting to get this application to work, I am no closer to a solution and my head is spinning.

Let’s examine why this is a problem, in relatively non-technical language: These ‘environments’ I mention provide everything you need to get a broad range of software up and running, connected to many types of database, working at scale with large numbers of users. They make it easy for systems administrator to monitor and manage applications. They are also based on open source specifications that allow you to freely switch between vendors and technologies. In theory…

The problem is that it never simply works to transfer an application between these vendor environments. They all have their own versions of ‘standards compliant’ software. Almost a decade ago, when these application servers were first conceived, there was vagueness in the standards as well as technical and ‘strategic’ reasons for these differences. I have blogged about these problems in the past. Some progress has been made, but we are still left with a situation where freely available open source solutions and lighter weight versions are still so much easier to work with than the enterprise offering of the big boys. Sure there is some added value they offer but it is at a considerable price.

The key attraction to Java software development is the ‘write once, run anywhere’ philosophy. It could be argued that these software environments add an extra layer which is completely at odds with the promise that you, as an application developer and an independent software vendor (which are so important to todays economies) can build and sell software to anyone. It means you may have to pick up the bill for a choice of technology you cannot make.

Is enterprise software evil, and is this deliberate anti competitive behaviour? And which organisations are the worst offenders? It does get you thinking…

So with the nights drawing in, and having started a new job several months ago, I thought I’d do a quick recap of the productive stuff I’ve done when not catching rays and enjoying the good weather:

Working on several internal and public search applications for a range of customers, using the Twigkit technology to produce first-class user experiences

Adding features and support for new search platforms to a well-architected framework

Working on building a portal for developers using Twigkit technology with searchable documentation, a component gallery and features to easily generate and work with Twigkit applications

Contributing to some open source projects. This is something I started an effort to do more of a while ago but I’m especially appreciative to be able to spend time as part of my job at Twigkit contributing back to open source software we use.

Helping Nator Designs get into the final throes of developing a full referral based job search web site, implementing the following along the way:

Nator Design’s referME job search

Nator Design’s referME job search

- A web-app single sign on framework

- Real-time notifications

- Super quick, fully asynchronous, search functionality

- Graph based database opening the potential for interesting analytics and visualisations

(OK so the above has been in the works for a long time but its finally coming together!)

Getting to grips with Angular.js – an impressively mature JS development ecosystem

Keeping an eye on the development of Elixir, fast becoming a contender for the language of choice for scalable software development in future

Working increasingly with the Elasticsearch platform

All these newer technologies have been interesting to work with, though I feel the more general Javascript techniques I’ve learnt are more important in the long-term as well as currently. Many of these technologies, while coming of age are likely more transitory. Something you gain by working on new projects is the ability to try different approaches and think about all the aspects of a piece of work that need to be considered to make life easier for everyone later on. This is so often neglected when writing Javascript, but is now becoming more essential due to the continued growth of the client-side web.

While it is a monolith of a language, I kind of hope Javascript doesn’t become completely ‘enterprisified’. I think applying simple tried and tested software engineering practices (transferable between programming languages) definitely makes sense to bring some order to the Wild-West JS has always been, without taking away from one of the key attractions of it which is some of the visibly cool things anyone can learn to do with the web.

Working with the new tech

I’ve been working with Elasticsearch for a few different projects lately, and I thought I’d summarise some of my thoughts and experiences now I’ve come to know it reasonably well. I say reasonably because due to the potential complexity of the queries and infrastructural architecture you can use with Elasticsearch, calling yourself an expert is never going to end well!

So what were my first impressions?

Elasticsearch is based on Lucene and designed to provide a thin JSON based RESTful web service wrapper

It doesn’t provide as many custom extensions as Solr and therefore feels a lot closer to using Lucene more directly (IMO – a good thing!)

It can be blisteringly fast, but many of the clients suffer from bloat and are hard to configure

It has a great foundation and approach designed for scalability and powerful query building

There are some really nice ways of working with nested / relational data

And my experiences:

Building up the queries in object form is not straightforward – the ‘killer’ app wrt. Elasticsearch would be a good query builder with a well designed API

A common pattern I’d recommend is indexing most data as ‘multi’ fields with an ‘untouched’ field which is not analyzed (and can be accessed via field_name.untouched)

None of the Java clients are hugely impressive

Working with JSON queries takes time to get used to – it doesn’t seem as intuitive as modifying Solr query params to me. I would recommend getting a good RESTful service GUI to help debug your queries

A note on Elasticity

One of the most notable things about Elasticsearch is the intelligent support for clustered instances and mitigating node failure. While I haven’t really worked with large enough datasets to need clustering, nor do I think that huge numbers of organisations really do, it is a big leap forward. The ease of setting up clusters of nodes and communicating effectively with them is impressive.

The only thing is, the cleverness of the distributed aspects of Elasticsearch is bordering on the realms of magic. Controlling and debugging what these seemingly autonomous nodes are doing could be fraught with difficulty. This notion of magic seems to have found its way into much Elasticsearch codebase e.g.:

There is no way to programatically control the number of threads a Java client spawns when connecting to Elasticsearch instances.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the cleverness involved in Elasticsearch, even it is also quite scary. Regardless of anyone’s opinion of this still maturing search platform: it seems the landscape of search is certainly changing and offering increasing possibilities.

One of the things that attracted me to programming as a hobby, and later a profession is the fact that you have the ability to create what you want and pick the best tools for the job to get you there. Technical excellence is easily identifiable in the ease of use of the resulting product in performing whatever function it is designed to carry out.

On the whole most software developers are relatively unconstrained in how they build things, as long as the desired result is achieved. Of course this is not always the case, and as I’ve blogged about in the past – ignoring implementation details and working in a black-box environment is not good for the health of software in general. There is a fine balance to be walked between freedom and restriction. Freedom allows for more creative solutions, but requires patience and discipline to deliver the task at hand. Restriction means more control over delivery, but will likely result in the same tired solutions that fail to impress users.

Ultimately striking this balance effectively is all about collaboration and communication: One of the most important things that is never taught in our profession is presenting an argument with evidence to back it up and resolving the best course of action within a team.

In my first few months at my new job at Twigkit I’ve been fortunate to work with a range of technologies, pragmatically picked to deliver great results with a minimum of fuss, as well as make my own choices too. As I see it: good collaboration is what allows this high bar of quality to be achieved.

To summarise and add some context: if everything is open for sensible, pragmatic discussion I think great things can be achieved. Problems arise when decisions are not based on pragmatism. If you have a blanket rule in an organisation of never adopting new versions of a technology or refactoring your own technology you leave yourself open to disruption. The same applies to not collaborating with or contributing to third-party organisations and projects.

Don’t be the organisation that follows where others go, be one that leads from the front when opportunities present themselves!

Well… it may not be the most earth-shattering realisation and you can probably get the take home message just from the title of the post, but who knew that you get a runtime exception when you try to modify (e.g. add or remove) anything from a List that has been returned from the Arrays.asList method in Java?

Unfortunately this code will throw an UnsupportedOperationException when dictionary.add gets called. The guys at Google are quick to the rescue and if you have their Guava or Collections libraries in your project you can resolve this issue by replacing the line with Array.asList with the following code:

However, it is worth considering that too much copying and converting of Lists and Arrays could expose an element of bad design in the code. It is always worth considering what you’re trying to achieve and if there is a more efficient way to do so.

Did you know you can use the command line wget tool to perform simple tests on your web site?

In a Linux environment combining the programmatic capabilities of a Bash (Bourne Again SHell) script with wget is pretty easy and allows you to carry out basic load and performance tests. These tests could be run directly from your local machine or any other remote machine or VM with a Bash shell and wget, which is pretty much any Linux distro.

When I recently wanted to check whether a problem, where my web servers died under load, was resolved I wrote the following simple script:

You can save this as wload.sh and execute it in a Linux environment using the command:
./wload.sh [your URL under test] [no. concurrent requests to fire]

I think these kind of scripts are pretty neat, and I believe there is definitely a place for the ‘humble’ Bash script in the development process every now and again. You can do a lot more with Bash than just fire off requests at a page and as it is essentially a programming language it can be very powerful in the right hands.

There is a lot of buzz at the moment in the front-end web technology world with frameworks such as AngularJS breaking into the mainstream of software departments around the world. However, bubbling under the surface there are some interesting developments going on in back-end technology, including new programming languages gaining some popularity and maturing. I thought I’d take a look at three languages you may have never heard of that are each targeted at different goals:

Elixir is built on top of the Erlang language, developed by Ericsson some time ago which is already used by many large organisations. Erlang’s main focus was to make concurrency and fault-tolerance part of the core language allowing for highly scalable software systems, originally intended for the telecoms industry. Elixir builds on Erlang to make it more of a productive general purpose language for distributed applications. You can take a whistle-stop tour of Elixir by watching this great presentation on YouTube from José Valim (the creator of the Elixir language).

Ioke is one of the many new languages to use the JVM as a platform. It uses prototype based object-orientation with no concept of specific classes as every data type is an instance. It is inspired by a number of languages including Smalltalk. It is more focused on expressiveness of objects, data structures and algorithms rather than concurrency per-se. This makes it a good contender for a language that is better at modelling a problem domain in object oriented code.

Mercury draws its inspiration from Prolog, which is probably my favorite programming language due to its simplicity and focus on logic. It is a strongly typed, highly declarative language including many of the currently popular functional programming concepts. It also allows for compiling to a number of ‘back-end’ platforms to run on including C and Java. This language has existed for some time, but now it is in a state of reasonable maturity it could well become a powerful language for writing specific types of software.

To sum up…

One of the key themes in each of these very different languages seems to be the concept of meta-programming. Each language is built on top of itself and code itself can very easily be manipulated to extend or alter functionality, enabled by the fact that everything can be broken down into the core constructs of the language. Put simply there is no bloat to these languages, the authors have thought long and hard about the syntactical concepts they want to include in order to avoid having too many different ways to implement common software patterns.

As a Java developer I am looking more to the changes in Java 8 for the impact on the work I do not too far down the road. But the landscape of the entire web stack is also very much in flux at the moment. It has been interesting to look at what other developments are out there that might be completely orthogonal to what I do day-to-day, but ultimately I’m sure will have an impact eventually.

Until fairly recently unit testing is an engineering practice I’ve had little exposure to. It’s perfectly possible to get by developing without unit tests, but they do help with the design, verification and maintenance of code.

A unit test is designed to test a small functional unit of code for a particular scenario. Generally multiple tests are written to verify different paths through the same method/function. Personally I think unit tests are particularly valuable in a continuous integration environment (e.g. Jenkins) where the tests run prior to regular deployment and developers are alerted of any failures.

There are many testing frameworks but for basic unit tests JUnit is pretty much the de-facto standard. The Eclipse IDE comes with a plugin already configured to allow unit tests within a project to be run by simply right-clicking on the project and running the code as a JUnit test. However JUnit tests can also be run stand alone through the command line, an Apache Ant task, or a Apache Maven build. Maven will automatically run unit tests placed in /src/test/java during a build by default.

The annotation @Before defines common code to run prior to the execution of each test method defined by @Test. [The getProperty method has been omitted]

This is a simple test which verifies that the implementation of the construction of a SayHello object followed by execution of the speak method results in a string being returned that contains the userName and productName which were passed in the constructor. This illustrates the difference between desired test behavior and the actual implementation. Here we are allowing the flexibility for the speak() method be modified as long as it returns a string containing both the username and the product name passed in.

Though this is a basic example hopefully this gives an idea of how unit tests are usually used to define desired behaviour (what the code should do) not necessarily implementation (how it does it). Writing tests allows you to clarify the behavior of your code which makes it a useful tool in code design as well as validation.

Having some time for reflection before the new year begins really helps to focus the mind. After some thought, here’s a summary of some things I will be working towards in 2014:

Put more effort into blogging to give quality Java software development tips, tutorials and information (read: you’re going to see some changes round here!)

Working on Nator Designs – a business I co-founded developing innovative web and mobile software

Contributing to and participating in the communities that serve individuals and business with quality free and open source software and support (a well from which I have drunk deeply in the past)

Investigating the notion of sustainable software development

Additionally if I get time, I’d also like to make some more progress on a project I started some time ago, which is still in its infancy, relating to logic and behavior in application frameworks.

However as life is often busy, if any of these peak your interest, and you would like to collaborate I would be interested to talk. Also if you are looking for help with your Java software development (search/web/mobile etc.) please get in touch with us at Nator Designs as we’re always happy to talk about code!

My wife and I finished up a busy 2013 in style with our honeymoon to Mexico and also visited some interesting countries off the Gulf of Mexico. This was an amazing experience, as well as an eye-opening one. I got to spend time with my beautiful wife, of course and also visit what is a beautiful country in many different senses of the word – not least of all the way it operates.

Mexico has its problems, for sure, but I get the feeling that in this day an age they are not necessarily greater or more stifling in magnitude than those of supposedly more ‘developed’ countries, they are just different. I’ll save the full review for TripAdvisor(!) but all the time we were there we felt safe and had a great time, and we learnt a lot about a culture very different from the neighbouring North American culture and somewhat different to our European culture as well. It certainly feels like there is an air of social change and it is clear from spending even a small length of time there that Socialism plays a big part in this.

I’ve never given the political and social history of South American countries much thought and certainly not considered the link between these factors and the interesting and rich culture found in South America. It’s amazing how visiting new places can give you a different perspective on the world and realise that there are many different approaches to solving problems and ways to live a fulfilling life.

Anyway, I’ve included a few photos from our honeymoon to break up some of the drabness of my last few posts!

Next in the thrilling installments of ‘Rants By a Prematurely Aporetic Programmer’ is an indictment of the great power given to the average intrepid code monkey.

I love to understand technology at a number of different levels – I think its great to be aware of how software works from the humble digital signal to the deployment process of a cloud hosted web app. But I don’t think any one man is an island and capable of managing several different contexts of a piece of software at once. So why then will you likely find cases of the intrepid code monkey fiddling with server configurations, munging data and delving into SQL databases?

Necessity it seems.

The same reason you will find many developers brew their own beer, wiring their own electrics or maintaining the vehicle they drive. Because a lot of the time no other bugger seems capable of getting the job done right. Of course this is an unjust criticism of the ‘other buggers’ around. Its not so much that no-one can or will help, but that the convenience of said code monkey taking on these challenges seems to be the best option in absence of any system, process or team dedicated the particular job at hand.

A recurring theme across so many organisations is that of our code monkey is being given so much power they actually have a sense of abject horror at how much they can fuck things up. None of us want to shoulder such a burden alone.

Fortunately in great teams, like-minded individuals share the responsibility together, and more often than not the end result is successful.

But it shouldn’t be this way. As with so many things it is easy to criticise, but harder to be constructively critical. All I can offer as a solution is that this power should be locked down and the boundaries of responsibility more clearly defined. Common sense must apply to avoid needless bureaucracy. But some checks and balances should be put in place.

By enforcing more of this kind of mindset, slowly things will (and to some extend are) changing. We don’t want to be given access to stuff we have no right to muck about with any more… and if you meet a programmer that does, I think you ought to be seriously suspicious.

My last post was about what makes information retrieval software valuable, and one of the most important cross-cutting factors in creating valuable software is quality. This is something I want to talk a bit more about because it one of the things that motivates me to do my job well and also frustrates me so much when it is ignored.

Assessing quality may seem trivial – if a product looks good, is pleasant to use and serves its purpose, its a high quality product, right? … Well not necessarily. What about criteria like; maintainability, adaptability and robustness? These are things that are hard to see up front when it comes to software. These are things a user doesn’t directly care about either. But they are things that in the long run will affect users and developers alike and account for the lifespan of a product.

So having some idea of the quality of a code-base is clearly important. The next question is how can you measure the quality of a code-base?

For decades people have tried with varying degrees of success to measure code quality. There are many tools which will give you metrics on anti-patterns implemented in your code, tell you how well teams are performing and give you an idea of how well your code is covered by automated tests. These are great advancements in helping to build good software. The problem is they also give us a false sense that we are on top of things and everything is OK, simply because we have these metrics available, and hey – if we plot them on a graph the esoteric line of quality keeps going up and up over time.

A reality check

It’s my considered opinion, that may come back to haunt me, that if you think you can improve a product’s quality at the same time as mindlessly adding features to a code-base, you’re full of shit. Just because the new ‘whatsit-widget’ in your product has been written alongside some unit-tests doesn’t mean you’re winning any kind of war against technical debt.

How about these for metrics: [many of these you can probably confirm looking at version control history]

how many times in the last year did developers at your organisation spend two weeks or more solely re-factoring code?

can you compare how long it takes to make modifications to existing components, features or classes?

how long does it take for a developer unfamiliar with a particular feature to feel comfortable changing the code behind it?

how many elements of the software are ‘owned’, and only ever modified by one developer?

can you describe a feature or a class in a few (3 or less) short sentences?

Bear in mind that these are not necessarily linear metrics – a really low number for ‘more than two weeks spent re-factoring’ would indicate not enough time allocated to improving quality, a very high number would indicate technical debt is never being repaid.

The above are just suggestions of the sorts of obvious indicators I think should be looked at when measuring code quality. I am by no means an expert on the subject. At the end of the day, if a software organisation is paying some attention to quality and have a reasonable degree of visibility of the quality their products (both on the surface and underneath) they are helping themselves to build better software.

There are a huge number of online services, both paid-for and freely available, which provide users the ability to search for, retrieve and digest content. As is so often the case with online products and services, quantifying the economic value of these and pinning down from where the value arises is extremely difficult.

It would be reasonable to assume that in some, probably unequal, proportion the value is largely created by the content and the search features that allow for the retrieval of this content.

Content

Obviously without content a search service is unlikely to have any value at all. Key factors in the value of the content include:

the quality and integrity of the data

the volume of material available

the format of the material

the relevance of the content to potential users (including recency of creation and publication)

how content which duplicates an original, perhaps physical, format varies from the original

Retrieval

Similarly without a appropriate mechanism to retrieve relevant data, a service will have little value. However as long as a user has some way to access relevant content, even if it is inconvenient or cumbersome, I would argue the quality of this is secondary to the quality of the content. Factors in the value of the retrieval include:

the speed at which a user can find results

the variety of ways a user can access the material (e.g. range of devices supported)

the ease of use

the range of search featuers supported

the ability to combine search features

Hold on, what sort of ‘value’ are we talking about?

You might have picked up on the fact that I haven’t specified what form of value these aspects of a search service create. This is the most difficult part of valuing a search service. Personally I think many of those factors mentioned above are high on the list in terms of creating value for the end-user: providing them with a reason to use the service itself. However, translating this into any kind of monetary value, in terms of what the customer is willing to pay for (if anything) is very tricky.

Open Library is an information retrieval service disrupting traditional publishing business models

What’s the point?

This creates one of the biggest challenges of the day in the publishing industry. Quantifying the cost and profit of products and features within them is problematic. This is particularly compounded by the fact that new ‘open access’ services featuring ‘open data’ are disrupting the business models publishers currently rely on. As a result many of those companies developing search services for profit have to make decisions with very limited evidence as to what to invest money in.

How can a search service make a sustainable profit?

Though I don’t have any answers myself, I feel its worth making the point that the above question remains mostly unanswered for many of the organisations involved in the ‘search business’. Obviously improving on all of the factors mentioned that affects a user’s perception of the service would certainly help, as happy users tends to equate to happy customers. There is also profit to be made in tools that empower individuals and organisations to create and publish the content featured in search services. But ultimately pinning down what makes for the success and failure of businesses in this industry is a hard task. Having said this, the company behind the most well known search service in the world, Google, has been making a sustained profit for many years and provide inspiration that it is possible to build a profitable search service.

What’s it to you?

‘Search’ is certainly an interesting area to work in from a technical perspective. But what is inspiring to me as a developer from a business perspective is that there are successful cases of businesses in this area that manage to maintain high standards in terms of quality, a healthy company culture and a level of professionalism while remaining financially viable.

Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
By Linus Torvalds and David Diamond

I’ve never been a Linux zealot, but like any self-respecting geek I’ve known the general background to the development of the Linux operating system and like to root for and support open source software wherever possible.

This book describes in detail Linus Torvalds’ (the ‘creator of linux’) background and early life, interspersed with segments from his meetings with David Diamond, the co-author. It then goes on to answer some of the typical questions you might have about a man who developed an operating system which powers millions of computers and devices while managing to remain at its heart freely available and freely modifiable. Linus sums the book up with convincing arguments for open source software and against the ‘evils’ of patents and intellectual property law.

I found the start of the book to be much more easy going to read, and consequently more enjoyable. Even the sections about the technical considerations during the birth of Linux that Linus had to deal with seemed well-conveyed and therefore really quite interesting to learn about. The latter half of the book was, to me, much less ‘fun’, but still important as some readers will want answers about open source software and how it works. Whether you agree with his opinions, it has to be said they are well expressed, and at times thought provoking.

Ultimately this is a book I’m glad I’ve read as it was enjoyable and insightful, if a little draining at times. Despite it’s age this book leaves you with a sense that the significance and relevance of both open source software and Linux in today’s world cannot be underestimated.

So SCRUM / Kanban / Lean is the greatest project management methodology ‘invented’, and all these fantastic advances took place within the last few decades?

That’s just plain silly, the greatest single thing that makes process improvement possible is our innate ability as a species to do a little thing called reflection. Please don’t focus too much on the name, we have far too many labels for stuff already. But I’d argue that the moment our ancestors genetically mutated to become able to think about what they are doing [wrong] and how they can change it [to improve], is the moment we really became able to rapidly advance as a civilisation.

My point in relation to software development is that everyone already has some degree of agility in their approach to their work. How measured and thought out it is may be debatable, but who doesn’t want to make their own job easier in some way?

In light of the fact that many people may already be no stranger to process improvement, it’s probably wise when applying an approach like SCRUM to first consider how things are working and being improved currently. The trouble with methodological frameworks is that if they are too tightly applied with too many rules, you lose the spontaneity of your ability to respond to change, and if they are too loosely applied then the process is likely to be ‘broken’ such that it might as well not exist in the first place. Much can be learnt from looking at existing procedures in place, which may in fact be much more applicable to the nature of the work in question and consider factors that (to begin with at least) the new way might ignore.

Often it seems to me that: the tools used, methods of communication, decision making procedure and working practices make a much more substantial contribution to how well stuff works in a company, than the chosen way. I’m not denying the importance of project management and process improvement, just expanding on the ‘no silver bullet’ theory in relation to programming languages, to apply to all aspects of software development, and indeed to any other industry. Just as there is no simple way to get rich quick there is no simple way to deliver stuff on time and on budget. It takes hard work, application of the little grey cells and the humility to reflect when things inevitably go wrong.

Echoing my views on software communities in the previous post, I recently took part in some talks about logic programming and Prolog. There’s some really interesting meetup groups in Cambridge for software development, and this one was no exception. You can view my slides here: http://sdrv.ms/119TGoA

If I get time and there is appetite for it I hope to post a bit more about logic programming in future, as its always been one of my interests and I see promoting its use where it can be beneficial as a really positive move! In future it will surely only become more important to use multiple programming techniques, choosing ‘the right tool for the job’ and inter-operating, rather than using one monolithic ‘multi-tool’.

The computing industry has spawned many communities which have an influence that spans across different online and offline sectors of society. These communities reach and bring together people from around the world with common interests and purposes. This stimulates productiveness in developing and using software. I would also argue that another effect these communities have in general is adding value to products, services, software and society at large which would be difficult to generate any other way.

I’m not a ‘business’ type of guy, nor am I a politician, but I recognise the importance of a community to software and society, even if I would struggle to foster one around a piece of software myself. Nearly all successful open source projects have a strong community, which often consists of a mixture of passionate individuals, businesses and partner organisations. There are a variety of methods that are used to organise and communicate within these communities including online forums, project management software, wikis, mailing lists, emails, meetup/user groups and conferences. Sometimes small communities work well, and sometimes a large critical mass of participants is required for these communities to be productive. The organisation of software communities also varies, with some having a very hierarchical structure and others being quite ad-hoc and ‘flat’. Different approaches work for different software.

The important message I’m trying to deliver is that community really matters for a lot of software projects, and not just to boost the profile and success of the software itself. It does a lot for the industry in general to have diverse communities which can help to break down barriers and get people interacting together. It helps developers and users to avoid the feeling of being lost in the wilderness and feel they have peers, and hopefully friends, they can turn to for advice. I think it can make our industry a more friendly, pleasant one to be involved with. That is of course dependent on how approachable the community in question is.